Ask the pilot

How often are passengers in the exit rows called into action? Isn't it safer to face backward in a plane? And other FAQs.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

June 2, 2006 | It's important to do this now and again -- get back to basics with an old-style questions-and-answers session. That's how this column got started, some of you might recall. And with 5 and a half million people taking to the air each day around the globe, suffice it to say the pool of incoming queries, in all their innumerable permutations, will never dry up. Besides, this week marks a certain erstwhile airman's 40th birthday, and touching back to Ask the Pilot's roots helps him to feel younger -- by a couple of years, anyway.

Q: Intuitively, I feel that the amount of space allotted to each economy-class passenger just keeps getting smaller. It might be interesting to compare and graph this depressing trend from, say, the days of the Lockheed Constellation to the newest large aircraft.

Changes to passenger space and onboard comforts are more difficult to quantify than you might expect. Over the years, accommodations have varied greatly plane to plane, airline to airline. With certain exceptions, the size of the typical economy-class chair hasn't really changed since jets became popular in the 1960s. Those exceptions include airlines that flirted with five-abreast seating on a 727 or 707, instead of the standard six, or four abreast in a DC-9 rather than five. But these were short-lived schemes, and the cross sections of airliners as you see them today are basically unchanged from 40 years ago. In some cases, particularly the 757 and A320 series, modern six-abreast aircraft are slightly wider than they used to be. The new Airbus A380 will have (in most configurations) the same 10-across floor plan as the 747, but is wider by approximately a foot.

What tends to change aren't the seats themselves but the amount of legroom between the rows, called "pitch" in the biz. Here, too, things have historically been better and worse. Anybody who flew Laker Airways' "SkyTrain" service between New York and London in the late 1970s knows just how tight a cabin could be. Sir Freddie, the flamboyant founder of Laker, who passed away last February, configured his DC-10s with a bone-crushing 345 seats -- about a hundred more than average.

Once upon a time, you would have found 110 seats on a given airline's Boeing 707, compared with 180 on another's. That was mainly a function of pitch. Nowadays the differences aren't as drastic, but airlines will occasionally use pitch in their marketing campaigns. American Airlines' "More Room Throughout Coach" promotion is one recent example. At the time, excess capacity allowed American to remove a certain number of rows from select aircraft, offering up to 5 extra inches of space between your knees and the seat in front of you. This program was scrapped a few years ago when American figured out that cheap tickets, not legroom, are ultimately its passengers' top priority. To oblige that demand and still make a profit meant squeezing in more people.

Other airlines have set apart portions of economy with increased pitch, usually at higher fares. United's "Economy Plus," for instance. British Airways and Virgin Atlantic feature similar cabins-within-a-cabin, as I discussed here in April.

The space issue is, to me, something of a red herring. It often feels that we have less room merely because service levels overall have become so lousy. And not to be overlooked is the ever-increasing girth of the average American. Space is a relative thing.

Dragging Lockheed Constellations and their ilk into the mix isn't really fair, as it compares two entirely different eras of air travel. Certainly, the old propeller liners of the '40s, '50s and early '60s had comparatively oversize seats and generally plush quarters, but these machines were designed with previous generations of travelers in mind. It was the advent of jetliners -- able to haul hundreds of people thousands of miles at astonishing speeds -- that made flying cheap, and by extension less comfortable, for everybody.

If you're looking for particular cabin specs, drop by one of my favorite Web sites, or the individual airline sites. Most include seat maps for each of their aircraft types.

This is something that perhaps only a hardcore enthusiast could understand, but I admit to experiencing a Zen-like contentment any time I study these weird diagrams. I'm not sure if I should admit this in a public forum, but I could spend long stretches of time poring over seat maps of the world's airlines. It's a form of wistful longing, I suppose, knowing I'll never have the means to occupy seat 1A aboard a Singapore Airlines 747 (not "Singapore Air" as Seat Guru presents it), combined with the kind of fetishizing so common among aerophiles. There are many forms of airliner porn out there, but among the most curious are computer programs that allow hobbyists to design their own aircraft interiors, dragging and dropping galleys, lavatories and rows of seats.

Q: I've wondered why passengers on commercial airliners are not seated facing the tail. In the event of a hard landing or a crash, wouldn't it be safer to have your back toward the direction of flight?

Next page: Airlines will not use safety as a marketing tool